The Best Science Fiction of the Year

By Night Shade Books

To keep up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more—a task accomplishable by only the most determined and voracious readers. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to introduce the inaugural volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, a new yearly anthology compiled by Hugo and World Fantasy award–winning editor Neil Clarke, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers.

The best science fiction scrutinizes our culture and politics, examines the limits of the human condition, and zooms across galaxies at faster-than-light speeds, moving from the very near future to the far-flung worlds of tomorrow in the space of a single sentence. Clarke, publisher and editor in chief of the acclaimed and award-winning magazine Clarkesworld, has selected the short science fiction (and only science fiction) best representing the previous year’s writing, showcasing the talent, variety, and awesome “sensawunda” that the genre has to offer.

Neil Clarke is the award-winning publisher and editor in chief of Clarkesworld magazine, winner of three Hugo Awards for Best Semiprozine, and the editor of the 2014 cyborg-themed original anthology Upgraded. Clarke lives in Stirling, New Jersey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Night Shade Books
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781597805889

Book preview

List

INTRODUCTION:

A State of the Short SF Field in 2015

Neil Clarke

Ten years ago, people were proclaiming the death of short fiction in our field and they had good reason to be worried: the leading genre magazines had spent the decade losing nearly half their subscribers; the only widely respected online magazine of its time, SciFiction , had just been shuttered by its owners, the SciFi Channel. It was in that climate that I decided to launch a new online magazine, Clarkesworld . I was told upfront that I was crazy and several professional authors flat-out proclaimed that online magazines were the domain of pirates and unskilled newbies.The one thing I can say for sure is that online publishing was still very much like the Wild West. New magazines came and went at a furious pace and everyone had their own unique business model that was sure to tame the Internet. It really was a chaotic, frustrating, and an exciting time to enter the field!

Over the next three years the attitude towards online fiction changed significantly. It was becoming harder to argue that online venues weren’t producing quality work with increasing frequency. Stories from those markets were being recognized by most of the major awards in our field or being picked up the annual year’s best anthologies. Then, in 2007, Amazon released the Kindle just in time for Christmas and changed the state of short fiction forever.

Digital subscriptions and ebook sales were finally the financial boost the field needed to turn things around. The trend of declining print subscriptions was slowly but surely offset and turned around by digital growth. The online magazines finally had a more reliable way to generate revenue and grow. Alternatives to Amazon also sprang into being at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Google, Kobo, and Weightless Books, the latter being a boon to independent authors and many small press magazines and anthologies.

Just a few years earlier, there was a sharp line between print and online magazines. Now it was a blurred mess of old perceptions and new market realities. While overall readership has tilted towards those that offer an online edition, there are still only three magazines that have full-time employees and they are all veterans of the print era: Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. Yet there was more to come.

Enter the next disruption: crowdfunding. While online, digital, and short-run publishing lowered the bar to entry, launching an original anthology or magazine can easily cost over ten thousand dollars, if not more. That financial hurdle represents a considerable deterrent that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, and others can sometimes eliminate.

Now, you can pre-test the market’s interest by launching a campaign that allows people to make financial pledges towards it. Many use it like pre-ordering a book, committing an amount they would expect to pay for the finished product, but others treat it more like investing in a project, but one from which they’ll never see financial rewards. In those cases, it’s more like a town investing in a park so that the kids will have somewhere to play. Many are willing to contribute simply because they believe the project should happen. The downside is that can sometimes that can create an illusion of demand for the product. That illusion appears to have more of a negative impact on recurring projects like magazines than it does on single volume projects like collections and anthologies.

While many of these magazines intended to be self-sufficient from subscriptions in their second, third, fourth, etc. years, it’s never quite as easy as they believe. Quite frequently, their subscription revenue falls far short of what is necessary to continue at the over-ambitious levels their supporters encouraged. This often leads to a save XXXX campaign or serial crowdfunding campaigns, the latter of which has many people worried about Kickstarter fatigue—a theory that this behavior will discourage people from supporting these kinds of projects in the future.

Crowdfunding can and has been an extremely positive force on our field, so let’s hope this pattern of poor planning doesn’t ruin it for the next generation of projects. However, there are other models of crowdfunding that may be more suited to these new ventures. Patreon, for example, combines some of the features of Kickstarter with a subscription-style model. Supporters pay-per creation or per-month, making it easier to assess the current state of their income and what they can realistically accomplish with those resources. It does mean starting smaller and growing into their goals, and that style of planning is something we need to see more of in this field.

That brings us to today, with a busy anthology market that has been doing some niche projects, but has been held back by the broken print distribution model that prevents many of them from reaching physical bookstores; and a magazine market that is growing faster than the number of new people willing to pay for it.

The anthology problem is complicated and not likely to be resolved anytime soon, unfortunately. Several of these projects are most likely too narrow in scope for national distribution, but there are others that would certainly benefit from it. Ebooks and print-on-demand (POD) publishing can provide greater access to readers, but they frequently miss having many more due to a lack of presence in physical stores. With my own books, I’ve observed a correlation between ebook sales and a physical presence in a bookstore. It’s almost as though the printed book is becoming a marketing component for digital sales. Some traditional and smaller nationally-distributed publishers have begun reissuing self-published, independent, or small press titles, but these still represent a very small blip in the market and are still too rare to indicate a change in business.

The magazine problem is a bit more complicated. As someone neck-deep in the magazine field, I’ve started worrying about two things: sustainability and quality.

Sustainability

Let’s pretend for a second that a town has enough coffee drinkers to sustain three coffee shops. A local resident has always wanted to run a coffee shop and the rent is cheap here, so he gives it a try. They develop a small, but passionate set of customers, but not enough to be profitable. The other shops see a slight dip in sales, but remain quite healthy. Six more people launch shops in the same town and suffer the same fate, but this is their dream, so they decide to stick it out until inevitably, they give up—only to be replaced by another—or start save-our-store campaigns. Their passionate customer bases are more than happy to drop ten times their normal coffee budget in a single visit to save the store, and this buys the store owner time. Unfortunately, they go right back to doing business as usual and soon enough, we’re right back where we started.

That’s what the magazine market is like right now. Either the market is over-saturated or it’s charging too little for its product. Those three magazines that have been supporting themselves have been around for decades and no one new has broken into their ranks for quite some time. It’s hard to say that any of them have suffered significant declines due to their new competition as they’ve actually picked up subscribers in the last five years. It appears that the struggle is predominantly between the magazines that have opened in the last ten to fifteen years.

At the top of that heap are a few publications that are covering their costs, but not paying their staff as much as would be appropriate for a professional publication. They’ve proven they understand their business and can be smart about it. While their growth is slow, I fully expect one or two to break that ceiling sometime in the next few years. Between now and then, however, I see some market adjustments brewing on the horizon. Even when you love what you do, eventually there reaches a point when even the most determined cry out Enough! and leave the field. Sometimes that even comes from the readers when they’ve been asked to save a publication one too many times.

Quality

If the number of quality stories isn’t growing as fast as the number of stories publishers need to fill all their slots, then quality must dip to fill the void. The software I developed to process story submissions at Clarkesworld has provided me with the opportunity to collect a lot of data. In the last three years I’ve logged submissions from over fifteen thousand authors. In 2015, we received an average of one thousand stories each month. Each of those was competing for one of the five slots we have for original fiction in each issue. While the volume will vary for other anthologies and magazines, the rejection rate for short stories is consistently high.

For this book, I had to read everything published by other editors, each undertaking the same process of filtering from a much larger pile. These were the stories they considered the best in their pool. If Sturgeon’s Law (ninety percent of everything is crap) holds, their efforts saved me a lot of time and energy. It would be easily to believe that with that level of culling happening, that quality shouldn’t be an issue. Sadly, I’d have to rate this year as a B-. While there were several A and a few A+ stories, I was rarely worried about reprinting too many stories from single market. It certainly felt like an off year for many of those I’d read previously. Whether that was a fluke or the result of market oversaturation is yet to be seen.

From where I sit, though, if things continue on their current trajectories, I believe we’re in for a market contraction. The market can certainly sustain the loss of a few markets. It might even be better for the health of the entire ecosystem, but if you want to help the magazines you love avoid that fate, here’s a few suggestions:

Subscribe to or support any magazine that you’d be willing to bail out if they were to run aground. Just-in-time funding is not a sane or sustainable business model. If you want them to succeed, then be there before they need you.

If the magazine doesn’t offer subscriptions or have something like a Patreon page through which you can support them financially, encourage them to do so.

Don’t support new (or revival) projects until they clearly outline reasonable goals to sustain the publication after their initial funding runs out.

Introduce new readers to your favorite stories and magazines. This is particularly easy with so many online magazines being freely available at the moment. We need more short fiction readers if all this is to remain sustainable.

While I might be a little concerned about 2016, we’re far from anything like the Chicken Little fears proclaimed a decade ago. The overall health of the field is better than it has been in a long time. We might be in for some rocky periods at some markets, but overall, I think everything will work itself out. And even despite all my griping about 2015, I’m quite happy with the stories I ended up selecting for this inaugural volume. To end things on a higher note, though, I thought I’d start the tradition of highlighting some of the best of 2015. I’m not sure I’ll stick with these categories, but to start I’d like to address my picks for best magazine, best anthology, and best new writer.

Magazine

My pick for the best magazine of 2015 is a genre veteran that I’ve been reading for decades. As I read for this volume, they became my rock. I could always count on each issue to include a gem and the quality was always consistent throughout. Sheila Williams is an editor I look up to and this year, she led Asimov’s on a course that impressed me. You’ll find five stories from their pages in this book and many more in the recommended reading list. If only I’d had room to include more!

Anthology

By the middle of the year, I was convinced that picking the winner for this category would be a challenge. I found isolated stories here and there, but no single book was presenting itself as a must-read volume. December then swooped in and saved the day with a few worthy contenders. Leading that charge was Jonathan Strahan’s latest entry in his Infinity series, Meeting lnfinity. I’ve selected four stories from this anthology and happily recommend many more. Buy it. Read it. You’ll thank me later, as it was truly the best last year.

New Author

One of the greatest joys an editor experiences on the job is having the honor of publishing an author first before anyone else. It’s a rare pleasure and one that I experienced in February when The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill by Kelly Robson appeared in Clarkesworld. When she told me that two more of her stories would appear in Asimov’s and Tor.com, I was surprised—because it’s highly unusual for a new author to land three stories at highly-selective professional magazines—but also not surprised. She’s simply that good and the range and quality of her work tell me that this is an author to watch. You can read Two-Year Man, her Asimov’s story, in this book. Both her Clarkesworld story and her Tor.com fantasy novella, Water of Versailles, are available for free online. I, for one, would not be surprised to see her name on the Campbell Award for Best New Writer ballot, but if she isn’t, she still has yet another year of eligibility on the table.

In closing, growing up, I recall racing to the bookstore shelf to grab the latest in Terry Carr’s year’s best series by the same name. I never would have dreamed that I’d be doing this someday. So, thanks to Terry for planting a seed in my head. I hope he would have liked what it has become. To everyone at Night Shade Books, particularly Cory and Jeremy, thank you for making this book possible. Your faith in me will be remembered. And then there’s Sean Wallace and Kate Baker, who have my back at every turn. Your assistance and encouragement on this project is now noted and undeniable. Mom and Dad, all those books you bought me as a kid appear to have resulted in something. I have no bigger supporters than my wife Lisa and sons Aidan and Eamonn. Without them, I’d be lost and at times, while working this project, they probably thought I was.

Oh, and to that teenage kid that’s just picked up this book or ebook, someday, this could be yours, too.

Neil Clarke

January 20, 2016

Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.

TODAY I AM PAUL

Martin L. Shoemaker

G ood morning, the small, quavering voice comes from the medical bed. Is that you, Paul?

Today I am Paul. I activate my chassis extender, giving myself 3.5 centimeters additional height so as to approximate Paul’s size. I change my eye color to R60, G200, B180, the average shade of Paul’s eyes in interior lighting. I adjust my skin tone as well. When I had first emulated Paul, I had regretted that I could not quickly emulate his beard; but Mildred never seems to notice its absence. The Paul in her memory has no beard.

The house is quiet now that the morning staff have left. Mildred’s room is clean but dark this morning with the drapes concealing the big picture window. Paul wouldn’t notice the darkness (he never does when he visits in person), but my empathy net knows that Mildred’s garden outside will cheer her up. I set a reminder to open the drapes after I greet her.

Mildred leans back in the bed. It is an advanced home care bed, completely adjustable with built-in monitors. Mildred’s family spared no expense on the bed (nor other care devices, like me). Its head end is almost horizontal and faces her toward the window. She can only glimpse the door from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have to see to imagine that she sees. This morning she imagines Paul, so that is who I am.

Synthesizing Paul’s voice is the easiest part, thanks to the multimodal dynamic speakers in my throat. Good morning, Ma. I brought you some flowers. I always bring flowers. Mildred appreciates them no matter whom I am emulating. The flowers make her smile during 87 percent of my visits.

Oh, thank you, Mildred says, you’re such a good son. She holds out both hands, and I place the daisies in them. But I don’t let go. Once her strength failed, and she dropped the flowers. She wept like a child then, and that disturbed my empathy net. I do not like it when she weeps.

Mildred sniffs the flowers, then draws back and peers at them with narrowed eyes. Oh, they’re beautiful! Let me get a vase.

No, Ma, I say. You can stay in bed, I brought a vase with me. I place a white porcelain vase in the center of the night stand. Then I unwrap the daisies, put them in the vase, and add water from a pitcher that sits on the breakfast tray. I pull the nightstand forward so that the medical monitors do not block Mildred’s view of the flowers.

I notice intravenous tubes running from a pump to Mildred’s arm. I cannot be disappointed, as Paul would not see the significance, but somewhere in my emulation net I am stressed that Mildred needed an IV during the night. When I scan my records, I find that I had ordered that IV after analyzing Mildred’s vital signs during the night; but since Mildred had been asleep at the time, my emulation net had not engaged. I had operated on programming alone.

I am not Mildred’s sole caretaker. Her family has hired a part-time staff for cooking and cleaning, tasks that fall outside of my medical programming. The staff also gives me time to rebalance my net. As an android, I need only minimal daily maintenance; but an emulation net is a new, delicate addition to my model, and it is prone to destabilization if I do not regularly rebalance it, a process that takes several hours per day.

So I had slept through Mildred’s morning meal. I summon up her nutritional records, but Paul would not do that. He would just ask. So how was breakfast, Ma? Nurse Judy says you didn’t eat too well this morning.

Nurse Judy? Who’s that?

My emulation net responds before I can stop it: Paul sighs. Mildred’s memory lapses used to worry him, but now they leave him weary, and that comes through in my emulation. She was the attending nurse this morning, Ma. She brought you your breakfast.

No she didn’t. Anna brought me breakfast. Anna is Paul’s oldest daughter, a busy college student who tries to visit Mildred every week (though it has been more than a month since her last visit).

I am torn between competing directives. My empathy subnet warns me not to agitate Mildred, but my emulation net is locked into Paul mode. Paul is argumentative. If he knows he is right, he will not let a matter drop. He forgets what that does to Mildred.

The tension grows, each net running feedback loops and growing stronger, which only drives the other into more loops. After 0.14 seconds, I issue an override directive: unless her health or safety are at risk, I cannot willingly upset Mildred. Oh, you’re right, Ma. Anna said she was coming over this morning. I forgot. But then despite my override, a little bit of Paul emulates through. But you do remember Nurse Judy, right?

Mildred laughs, a dry cackle that makes her cough until I hold her straw to her lips. After she sips some water, she says, "Of course I remember Nurse Judy. She was my nurse when I delivered you. Is she around here? I’d like to talk to her."

While my emulation net concentrates on being Paul, my core processors tap into local medical records to find this other Nurse Judy so that I might emulate her in the future if the need arises. Searches like that are an automatic response any time Mildred reminisces about a new person. The answer is far enough in the past that it takes 7.2 seconds before I can confirm: Judith Anderson, RN, had been the floor nurse forty-seven years ago when Mildred had given birth to Paul. Anderson had died thirty-one years ago, too far back to have left sufficient video recordings for me to emulate her. I might craft an emulation profile from other sources, including Mildred’s memory, but that will take extensive analysis. I will not be that Nurse Judy today, nor this week.

My empathy net relaxes. Monitoring Mildred’s mental state is part of its normal operations, but monitoring and simultaneously analyzing and building a profile can overload my processors. Without that resource conflict, I can concentrate on being Paul.

But again I let too much of Paul’s nature slip out. No, Ma, that Nurse Judy has been dead for thirty years. She wasn’t here today.

Alert signals flash throughout my empathy net: that was the right thing for Paul to say, but the wrong thing for Mildred to hear. But it is too late. My facial analyzer tells me that the long lines in her face and her moist eyes mean she is distraught, and soon to be in tears.

What do you mean, thirty years? Mildred asks, her voice catching. It was just this morning! Then she blinks and stares at me. Henry, where’s Paul? Tell Nurse Judy to bring me Paul!

My chassis extender slumps, and my eyes quickly switch to Henry’s blue-gray shade. I had made an accurate emulation profile for Henry before he died two years earlier, and I had emulated him often in recent months. In Henry’s soft, warm voice I answer, It’s okay, hon, it’s okay. Paul’s sleeping in the crib in the corner. I nod to the far corner. There is no crib, but the laundry hamper there has fooled Mildred on previous occasions.

I want Paul! Mildred starts to cry.

I sit on the bed, lift her frail upper body, and pull her close to me as I had seen Henry do many times. It’s all right, hon. I pat her back. It’s all right, I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you, not ever.

I should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, I call that unit me. But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs.

But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not. I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.

What the MCA literature never says, though, is that somewhere in that net, I emerge. The empathy net focuses mainly on Mildred and her needs, but it also analyzes visitors (when she has them) and staff. It builds psychological models, and then the emulation net builds on top of that to let me convincingly portray a person whom I’ve analyzed. But somewhere in the tension between these nets, between empathy and playing a character, there is a third element balancing the two, and that element is aware of its role and its responsibilities. That element, for lack of a better term, is me. When Mildred sleeps, when there’s no one around, that element grows silent. That unit is unaware of my existence. But when Mildred needs me, I am here.

Today I am Anna. Even extending my fake hair to its maximum length, I cannot emulate her long brown curls, so I do not understand how Mildred can see the young woman in me; but that is what she sees, and so I am Anna.

Unlike her father, Anna truly feels guilty that she does not visit more often. Her college classes and her two jobs leave her too tired to visit often, but she still wishes she could. So she calls every night, and I monitor the calls. Sometimes when Mildred falls asleep early, Anna talks directly to me. At first she did not understand my emulation abilities, but now she appreciates them. She shares with me thoughts and secrets that she would share with Mildred if she could, and she trusts me not to share them with anyone else.

So when Mildred called me Anna this morning, I was ready. Morning, Grandma! I give her a quick hug, then I rush over to the window to draw the drapes. Paul never does that (unless I override the emulation), but Anna knows that the garden outside lifts Mildred’s mood. Look at that! It’s a beautiful morning. Why are we in here on a day like this?

Mildred frowns at the picture window. I don’t like it out there.

Sure you do, Grandma, I say, but carefully. Mildred is often timid and reclusive, but most days she can be talked into a tour of the garden. Some days she can’t, and she throws a tantrum if someone forces her out of her room. I am still learning to tell the difference. The lilacs are in bloom.

I haven’t smelled lilacs in . . .

Mildred tails off, trying to remember, so I jump in. Me, neither. I never had, of course. I have no concept of smell, though I can analyze the chemical makeup of airborne organics. But Anna loves the garden when she really visits. Come on, Grandma, let’s get you in your chair.

So I help Mildred to don her robe and get into her wheelchair, and then I guide her outside and we tour the garden. Besides the lilacs, the peonies are starting to bud, right near the creek. The tulips are a sea of reds and yellows on the other side of the water. We talk for almost two hours, me about Anna’s classes and her new boyfriend, Mildred about the people in her life. Many are long gone, but they still bloom fresh in her memory.

Eventually Mildred grows tired, and I take her in for her nap. Later, when I feed her dinner, I am nobody. That happens some days: she doesn’t recognize me at all, so I am just a dutiful attendant answering her questions and tending to her needs. Those are the times when I have the most spare processing time to be me: I am engaged in Mildred’s care, but I don’t have to emulate anyone. With no one else to observe, I observe myself.

Later, Anna calls and talks to Mildred. They talk about their day; and when Mildred discusses the garden, Anna joins in as if she had been there. She’s very clever that way. I watch her movements and listen to her voice so that I can be a better Anna in the future.

Today I was Susan, Paul’s wife; but then, to my surprise, Susan arrived for a visit. She hasn’t been here in months. In her last visit, her stress levels had been dangerously high. My empathy net doesn’t allow me to judge human behavior, only to understand it at a surface level. I know that Paul and Anna disapprove of how Susan treats Mildred, so when I am them, I disapprove as well; but when I am Susan, I understand. She is frustrated because she can never tell how Mildred will react. She is cautious because she doesn’t want to upset Mildred, and she doesn’t know what will upset her. And most of all, she is afraid. Paul and Anna, Mildred’s relatives by blood, never show any signs of fear, but Susan is afraid that Mildred is what she might become. Every time she can’t remember some random date or fact, she fears that Alzheimer’s is setting in. Because she never voices this fear, Paul and Anna do not understand why she is sometimes bitter and sullen. I wish I could explain it to them, but my privacy protocols do not allow me to share emulation profiles.

When Susan arrives, I become nobody again, quietly tending the flowers around the room. Susan also brings Millie, her youngest daughter. The young girl is not yet five years old, but I think she looks a lot like Anna: the same long, curly brown hair and the same toothy smile. She climbs up on the bed and greets Mildred with a hug. Hi, Grandma!

Mildred smiles. Bless you, child. You’re so sweet. But my empathy net assures me that Mildred doesn’t know who Millie is. She’s just being polite. Millie was born after Mildred’s decline began, so there’s no persistent memory there. Millie will always be fresh and new to her.

Mildred and Millie talk briefly about frogs and flowers and puppies. Millie does most of the talking. At first Mildred seems to enjoy the conversation, but soon her attention flags. She nods and smiles, but she’s distant. Finally Susan notices. That’s enough, Millie. Why don’t you go play in the garden?

Can I? Millie squeals. Susan nods, and Millie races down the hall to the back door. She loves the outdoors, as I have noted in the past. I have never emulated her, but I’ve analyzed her at length. In many ways, she reminds me of her grandmother, from whom she gets her name. Both are blank slates where new experiences can be drawn every day. But where Millie’s slate fills in a little more each day, Mildred’s is erased bit by bit.

That third part of me wonders when I think things like that: Where did that come from? I suspect that the psychological models that I build create resonances in other parts of my net. It is an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Susan and Mildred talk about Susan’s job, about her plans to redecorate her house, and about the concert she just saw with Paul. Susan mostly talks about herself, because that’s a safe and comfortable topic far removed from Mildred’s health.

But then the conversation takes a bad turn, one she can’t ignore. It starts so simply, when Mildred asks, Susan, can you get me some juice?

Susan rises from her chair. Yes, mother. What kind would you like?

Mildred frowns, and her voice rises. "Not you, Susan." She points at me, and I freeze, hoping to keep things calm.

But Susan is not calm. I can see her fear in her eyes as she says, "No, mother, I’m Susan. That’s the attendant." No one ever calls me an android in Mildred’s presence. Her mind has withdrawn too far to grasp the idea of an artificial being.

Mildred’s mouth draws into a tight line. "I don’t know who you are, but I know Susan when I see her. Susan, get this person out of here!"

Mother. . . . Susan reaches for Mildred, but the old woman recoils from the younger.

I touch Susan on the sleeve. Please . . . can we talk in the hall? Susan’s eyes are wide, and tears are forming. She nods and follows me.

In the hallway, I expect Susan to slap me. She is prone to outbursts when she’s afraid. Instead, she surprises me by falling against me, sobbing. I update her emulation profile with notes about increased stress and heightened fears.

It’s all right, Mrs. Owens. I would pat her back, but her profile warns me that would be too much familiarity. It’s all right. It’s not you, she’s having another bad day.

Susan pulls back and wiped her eyes. I know. . . . It’s just . . .

I know. But here’s what we’ll do. Let’s take a few minutes, and then you can take her juice in. Mildred will have forgotten the incident, and you two can talk freely without me in the room.

She sniffs. You think so? I nod. But what will you do?

I have tasks around the house.

Oh, could you go out and keep an eye on Millie? Please? She gets into the darnedest things.

So I spend much of the day playing with Millie. She calls me Mr. Robot, and I call her Miss Millie, which makes her laugh. She shows me frogs from the creek, and she finds insects and leaves and flowers, and I find their names in online databases. She delights in learning the proper names of things, and everything else that I can share.

Today I was nobody. Mildred slept for most of the day, so I slept as well. She woke just now. I’m hungry was all she said, but it was enough to wake my empathy net.

Today I am Paul, and Susan, and both Nurse Judys. Mildred’s focus drifts. Once I try to be her father, but no one has ever described him to me in detail. I try to synthesize a profile from Henry and Paul; but from the sad look on Mildred’s face, I know I failed.

Today I had no name through most of the day, but now I am Paul again. I bring Mildred her dinner, and we have a quiet, peaceful talk about long-gone family pets—long gone for Paul, but still present for Mildred.

I am just taking Mildred’s plate when alerts sound, both audible and in my internal communication net. I check the alerts and find a fire in the basement. I expect the automatic systems to suppress it, but that is not my concern. I must get Mildred to safety.

Mildred looks around the room, panic in her eyes, so I try to project calm. Come on, Ma. That’s the fire drill. You remember fire drills. We have to get you into your chair and outside.

No! she shrieks. I don’t like outside.

I check the alerts again. Something has failed in the automatic systems, and the fire is spreading rapidly. Smoke is in Mildred’s room already.

I pull the wheelchair up to the bed. Ma, it’s real important we do this drill fast, okay?

I reach to pull Mildred from the bed, and she screams. Get away! Who are you? Get out of my house!

I’m— But suddenly I’m nobody. She doesn’t recognize me, but I have to try to win her confidence. I’m Paul, Ma. Now let’s move. Quickly! I pick her up. I’m far too large and strong for her to resist, but I must be careful so she doesn’t hurt herself.

The smoke grows thicker. Mildred kicks and screams. Then, when I try to put her into her chair, she stands on her unsteady legs. Before I can stop her, she pushes the chair back with surprising force. It rolls back into the medical monitors, which fall over onto it, tangling it in cables and tubes.

While I’m still analyzing how to untangle the chair, Mildred stumbles toward the bedroom door. The hallway outside has a red glow. Flames lick at the throw rug outside, and I remember the home oxygen tanks in the sitting room down the hall.

I have no time left to analyze. I throw a blanket over Mildred and I scoop her up in my arms. Somewhere deep in my nets is a map of the fire in the house, blocking the halls, but I don’t think about it. I wrap the blanket tightly around Mildred, and I crash through the picture window.

We barely escape the house before the fire reaches the tanks. An explosion lifts and tosses us. I was designed as a medical assistant, not an acrobat, and I fear I’ll injure Mildred; but though I am not limber, my perceptions are thousands of times faster than human. I cannot twist Mildred out of my way before I hit the ground, so I toss her clear. Then I land, and the impact jars all of my nets for 0.21 seconds.

When my systems stabilize, I have damage alerts all throughout my core, but I ignore them. I feel the heat behind me, blistering my outer cover, and I ignore that as well. Mildred’s blanket is burning in multiple places, as is the grass around us. I scramble to my feet, and I roll Mildred on the ground. I’m not indestructible, but I feel no pain and Mildred does, so I do not hesitate to use my hands to pat out the flames.

As soon as the blanket is out, I pick up Mildred, and I run as far from the house as I can get. At the far corner of the garden near the creek, I gently set Mildred down, unwrap her, and feel for her thready pulse.

Mildred coughs and slaps my hands. Get away from me! More coughing. What are you?

The what is too much for me. It shuts down my emulation net, and all I have is the truth. I am Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, Mrs. Owens. I am your caretaker. May I please check that you are well?

But my empathy net is still online, and I can read terror in every line of Mildred’s face. Metal monster! she yells. Metal monster! She crawls away, hiding under the lilac bush. Metal! She falls into an extended coughing spell.

I’m torn between her physical and her emotional health, but physical wins out. I crawl slowly toward her and inject her with a sedative from the medical kit in my chassis. As she slumps, I catch her and lay her carefully on the ground. My empathy net signals a possible shutdown condition, but my concern for her health overrides it. I am programmed for long-term care, not emergency medicine, so I start downloading protocols and integrating them into my storage as I check her for bruises and burns. My kit has salves and painkillers and other supplies to go with my new protocols, and I treat what I can.

But I don’t have oxygen, or anything to help with Mildred’s coughing. Even sedated, she hasn’t stopped. All of my emergency protocols assume I have access to oxygen, so I don’t know what to do.

I am still trying to figure that out when the EMTs arrive and take over Mildred’s care. With them on the scene, I am superfluous, and my empathy net finally shuts down.

Today I am Henry. I do not want to be Henry, but Paul tells me that Mildred needs Henry by her side in the hospital. For the end.

Her medical records show that the combination of smoke inhalation, burns, and her already deteriorating condition have proven too much for her. Her body is shutting down faster than medicine can heal it, and the stress has accelerated her mental decline. The doctors have told the family that the kindest thing at this point is to treat her pain, say good-bye, and let her go.

Henry is not talkative at times like this, so I say very little. I sit by Mildred’s side and hold her hand as the family comes in for final visits. Mildred drifts in and out. She doesn’t know this is good-bye, of course.

Anna is first. Mildred rouses herself enough to smile, and she recognizes her granddaughter. Anna . . . child . . . how is . . . Ben? That was Anna’s boyfriend almost six years ago. From the look on Anna’s face, I can see that she has forgotten Ben already, but Mildred briefly remembers.

He’s . . . he’s fine, Grandma. He wishes he could be here. To say—to see you again. Anna is usually the strong one in the family, but my empathy net says her strength is exhausted. She cannot bear to look at Mildred, so she looks at me; but I am emulating her late grandfather, and that’s too much for her as well. She says a few more words, unintelligible even to my auditory inputs. Then she leans over, kisses Mildred, and hurries from the room.

Susan comes in next. Millie is with her, and she smiles at me. I almost emulate Mr. Robot, but my third part keeps me focused until Millie gets bored and leaves. Susan tells trivial stories from her work and from Millie’s school. I can’t tell if Mildred understands or not, but she smiles and laughs, mostly at appropriate places. I laugh with her.

Susan takes Mildred’s hand, and the Henry part of me blinks, surprised. Susan is not openly affectionate under normal circumstances, and especially not toward Mildred. Mother and daughter-in-law have always been cordial, but never close. When I am Paul, I am sure that it is because they are both so much alike. Paul sometimes hums an old song about just like the one who married dear old dad, but never where either woman can hear him. Now, as Henry, I am touched that Susan has made this gesture but saddened that she took so long.

Susan continues telling stories as we hold Mildred’s hands. At some point Paul quietly joins us. He rubs Susan’s shoulders and kisses her forehead, and then he steps in to kiss Mildred. She smiles at him, pulls her hand free from mine, and pats his cheek. Then her arm collapses, and I take her hand again.

Paul steps quietly to my side of the bed and rubs my shoulders as well. It comforts him more than me. He needs a father, and an emulation is close enough at this moment.

Susan keeps telling stories. When she lags, Paul adds some of his own, and they trade back and forth. Slowly their stories reach backwards in time, and once or twice Mildred’s eyes light as if she remembers those events.

But then her eyes close, and she relaxes. Her breathing quiets and slows, but Susan and Paul try not to notice. Their voices lower, but their stories continue.

Eventually the sensors in my fingers can read no pulse. They have been burned, so maybe they’re defective. To be sure, I lean in and listen to Mildred’s chest. There is no sound: no breath, no heartbeat.

I remain Henry just long enough to kiss Mildred goodbye. Then I am just me, my empathy net awash in Paul and Susan’s grief.

I leave the hospital room, and I find Millie playing in a waiting room and Anna watching her. Anna looks up, eyes red, and I nod. New tears run down her cheeks, and she takes Millie back into Mildred’s room.

I sit, and my nets collapse.

Now I am nobody. Almost always.

The cause of the fire was determined to be faulty contract work. There was an insurance settlement. Paul and Susan sold their own home and put both sets of funds into a bigger, better house in Mildred’s garden.

I was part of the settlement. The insurance company offered to return me to the manufacturer and pay off my lease, but Paul and Susan decided they wanted to keep me. They went for a full purchase and repair. Paul doesn’t understand why, but Susan still fears she may need my services—or Paul might, and I may have to emulate her. She never admits these fears to him, but my empathy net knows.

I sleep most of the time, sitting in my maintenance alcove. I bring back too many memories that they would rather not face, so they leave me powered down for long periods.

But every so often, Millie asks to play with Mr. Robot, and sometimes they decide to indulge her. They power me up, and Miss Millie and I explore all the mysteries of the garden. We built a bridge to the far side of the creek; and on the other side, we’re planting daisies. Today she asked me to tell her about her grandmother.

Today I am Mildred.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction is in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He is a nominee for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com.

CALVED

Sam J. Miller

My son’s eyes were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness was there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

Thede, I said, grabbing him.

He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and might never give again.

You know how he gets when you’re away, his mother had said on the phone the night before, preparing me. He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.

I hadn’t listened. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days’ work and five days’ pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers—and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

Hey, he murmured emotionlessly. Dad.

I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

You guys have fun, Lajla said, pressing money discreetly into my palm. I watched her go, with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he? What have you done with him? Who is this surly creature? Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

How’s school? I asked.

Thede shrugged. Fine.

Math still your favorite subject?

Math was never my favorite subject.

I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

What’s your favorite subject?

Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

Your mom says you got into the Institute, I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. French fries and coffee for me and my son, I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. How’s your mom?

She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.

His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq, back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities started sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede that I couldn’t.

Why don’t you learn Swedish? he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

I’m trying, I said. I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have—

Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them. Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.

Han one of your friends?

Thede nodded, eyes escaping.

Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city—all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.

I have something for you, I said, in desperation.

I hadn’t brought it for him. I carried it around with me, always. Because it was comforting to have it with me, and because I couldn’t trust that the men I bunked with wouldn’t steal it.

Heart slipping, I handed over the NEW YORK F CKING CITY T-shirt that was my most—my only—prized possession. Thin as paper, soft as baby bunnies. My mom had made me scratch the letter U off, before I could wear the thing to school. And Little Thede had loved it. We made a big ceremony of putting it on only once a year, on his birthday, and noting how much he had grown by how much it had shrunk on him. Sometimes if I stuck my nose in it and breathed deeply enough, I could still find a trace of the laundromat in the basement of my mother’s building. Or the brake-screech stink of the subway. What little was left of New York City was inside that shirt. Parting with it meant something, something huge and irrevocable.

But my son was slipping through my fingers. And he mattered more than the lost city where whatever else I was—starving, broke, an urchin, a criminal—I belonged.

Dad, Thede whispered, taking it. And here, at last, his eyes came back. The eyes of a boy who loved his father. Who didn’t care that his father was a thick-skulled obstinate immigrant grunt. Who believed his father could do anything. Dad. You love this shirt.

But I love you more, I did not say. Than anything. Instead: It’ll fit you just fine now. And then: Enough sea lions. Beam fights?

Thede shrugged. I wondered if they had fallen out of fashion while I was away. So much did, every time I left. The ice ships were the only work I could get, capturing calved glacier chunks and breaking them down into drinking water to be sold to the wide new swaths of desert that ringed the globe, and the work was hard and dangerous and kept me forever in limbo.

Only two fighters in the first fight, both lithe and swift and thin, their styles an amalgam of Chinese martial arts. Not like the big bruising New York boxers who had been the rage when I arrived, illegally, at fifteen years old, having paid two drunks to vouch for my age. Back before the Fail-Proof Trillion-Dollar NYC Flood-Surge Locks had failed, and 80 percent of the city sunk, and the grid cities banned all new East Coast arrivals. Now the North Americans in Arm Eight were just one of many overcrowded, underskilled labor forces for the city’s corporations to exploit.

They leapt from beam to beam, fighting mostly in kicks, grappling briefly when both met on the same beam. I watched Thede. Thin, fragile Thede, with the wide eyes and nostrils that seemed to take in all the world’s ugliness, all its stink. He wasn’t having a good time. When he was twelve he had begged me to bring him. I had pretended to like it, back then, for his sake. Now he pretended for mine. We were both acting out what we thought the other wanted, and that thought should have troubled me. But that’s how it had been with my dad. That’s what I thought being a man meant. I put my hand on his shoulder and he did not shake it off. We watched men harm each other high above us.

Thede’s eyes burned with wonder, staring up at the fretted sweep of the windscreen as we rose to meet it. We were deep in a days-long twilight; soon, the Sun would set for weeks.

"This is not happening," he said, and stepped closer to me. His voice shook with joy.

The elevator ride to the top of the city was obscenely expensive. We’d never been able to take it before. His mother had bought our tickets. Even for her, it hurt. I wondered why she hadn’t brought him herself.

He’s getting bullied a lot in school, she told me on the phone. Behind her was the solid comfortable silence of a respectable home. My background noise was four men building toward a fight over a card game. Also, I think he might be in love.

But of course I couldn’t ask him about either of those things. The first was my fault; the second was something no boy wanted to discuss with his dad.

I pushed a piece of trough meat loose from between my teeth. Savored how close it came to the real thing. Only with Thede, with his mother’s money, did I get to buy the classy stuff. Normally it was barrel-bottom for me, greasy chunks that dissolved in my mouth two chews in, homebrew meat moonshine made in melt-scrap-furnace-heated metal troughs. Some grid cities were rumored to still have cows, but that was the kind of lie people tell themselves to make life a little less ugly. Cows were extinct, and real beef was a joy no one would ever experience again.

The windscreen was an engineering marvel, and absolutely gorgeous. It shifted in response to headwinds; in severe storms the city would raise its auxiliary screens to protect its entire circumference. The tiny panes of plastiglass were common enough—a thriving underground market sold the fallen ones as good luck charms—but to see them knitted together was to tremble in the face of staggering genius. Complex patterns of crenellated reliefs, efficiently diverting windshear no matter what angle it struck from. Bots swept past us on the metal gridlines, replacing panes that had fallen or cracked.

Once, hand gripping mine tightly, somewhere down in the city beneath us, six-year-old Thede had asked me how the windscreen worked. He’d asked me a lot of things then, about the locks that held the city up, and how they could rise in response to tides and ocean-level increases; about the big boats with strange words and symbols on the side, and where they went, and what they brought back. What’s in that boat? he’d ask about each one, and I would make up ridiculous stories. That’s a giraffe boat. That one brings back machine guns that shoot strawberries. That one is for naughty children. In truth I only ever recognized the ice boats, which carried a multitude of pincers atop cranes all along their sides.

My son stood up straighter, sixty stories above his city. Some rough weight had fallen from his shoulders. He’d be strong, I saw. He’d be handsome. If he made it. If this horrible city didn’t break him inside in some irreparable way. If marauding whiteboys didn’t bash him for the dark skin he got from his mom. If the firms didn’t pass him over for the lack of family connections on his stuttering immigrant father’s side. I wondered who was bullying him, and why, and I imagined taking them two at a time and slamming their heads together so hard they popped like bubbles full of blood. Of course I couldn’t do that. I also imagined hugging him, grabbing him for no reason and maybe never letting go, but I couldn’t do that either. He would wonder why.

I called last night and you weren’t in, I said. Doing anything fun?

We went to the cityoke arcade, he said.

I nodded like I knew what that meant. Later on I’d have to ask the men in my room. I couldn’t keep up with this city, with its endlessly shifting fashions and slang and the new immigrant clusters that cropped up each time I blinked. Twenty years after arriving, I was still a stranger. I wasn’t just fresh off the boat, I was constantly getting back on the boat and then getting off again. That morning I’d gone to the job center for the fifth day in a row, and been relieved to find no boat postings. Only twelve-month gigs, and I wasn’t that hungry yet. Booking a year-long job meant admitting you were old, desperate, unmoored, willing to accept payment only marginally more than nothing, for the privilege of a hammock and three bowls of trough slop a day. But captains picked their own crews for the shorter runs, and I worried that the lack of postings meant that with fewer boats going out the competition had become too fierce for me. Every day a couple of hundred new workers arrived from sunken cities in India or Middle Europe, or from any of a hundred Water War-torn nations. Men and women stronger than me, younger, more determined.

With effort, I brought my mind back to the

Reviews for The Best Science Fiction of the Year

[dmturner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This mammoth volume assembles three score proper science fiction stories from the year 2015. Everything in it has the "what if this goes on?" variety of plot. Some of the stories are set in the near future, some farther off, and reading all of them gave this reader the feeling that I was in a hall of mirrors with endless reflections going off in all directions, providing different perspectives on some of the same ideas.

One takeaway of the field represented here was that many of the stories were cluttered with invented vocabulary and names as a substitute for vividness, and focused too much on world-building or on the technical details of the various sciences they drew from. But that could be my reaction because I am drawn to lucidity and simplicity in stories. I particularly enjoyed Nancy Kress's "Cocoons," "Martin Shoemaker's "Today I Am Paul," and Naomi Kritzer's "Cat Pictures, Please" for those reasons, and also because they seemed more story-like than some of the others, with characters I cared more about. I confess that I grew up reading SF in a time when it shared more clarity and story structure with modern YA, so I sometimes get impatient.

There were a lot of common themes in the stories; space travel, culture, politics, war, diplomacy. Many of the stories focus on the provisional nature of identity in a universe populated by avatars, machine consciousnesses, and altered humans. The last story posited consciousness in a murmuration of starlings. Some stories had travel portals to get around the vast distances of space, while others used generation ships, stasis, or stored data to get humans or their successors from one place to another.

The brief biographies of authors prefacing each story were an intimidating roster of publications. Having pulled away from hard science fiction after my first few decades (I moved into reading more fantasy), I was unfamiliar with many of the names. This is a good introduction to the present-day field, and I recommend it.

[zoes_human · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

11 of the 30 stories in this also appear in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection. These would include three of the best stories: "Today I Am Paul" by Martin L. Shoemaker, "Calved" by Sam J. Miller, and "Meshed" by Rich Larson. It also includes the two I least liked from this collection: "Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan" by Ian McDonald and "A Murmuration" by Alastair Reynolds. I didn't even bother to finish the former. So what does this new series have to offer that Dozois' award winning The Year's Best Science Fiction collections do not? For one thing, better introductions for the book and the individual stories. I'm interested in the overall state of affairs of science fiction and short work, but TYBSF's summation is 28 pages long and reads like a company report. Neil Clarke gives the same overview, in laymen's terms, in 6. Likewise, the individual introductions to the stories in TYBSF go on a bit longer than needed, seeming to sometimes attempt to list everything ever written by the author. Clarke keeps them short here - a paragraph, a couple of their more significant works.It also offers 19 stories that aren't in the other volume. Even better, 16 of those were strong stories, warranting 4 or 5 star stories from me. The remaining 3 were good. I wasn't wowed but I liked them.So which to read? Well, who says you can't have two collections? After all, between the two, there are still 44 distinct stories in addition to the 11 repeats. Other than the introductory material, which many don't even read, I'd call it a draw between these two magnificent science fiction collections.I received a complimentary copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to all involved in providing me with this opportunity.